Hi,
in nearly all of the sheet music I read, tuplets are depicted with round brackets, but Dorico only displays them with square brackets. I vastly prefer round brackets.
Will Dorico implement such a possibility in the future?
@gagiuino
I think this feature request already came up a couple of times. I am also one of the users, who asked for it.
At the same time, round brackets are ambiguous, they can be read as a slur.
This is quite often the case in handwritten old manuscripts and has led to wrong translation into modern notation. I think the problem for Dorico is, it separates very clearly semantically betweent a graphical item (bracket) or wether it has a musical meaning (slur).
I think brackets have been the more usual modern convention for many years. Not quite a century, perhaps.
(I agree that Dorico ought to provide it as an option.)
One of the reasons it fell out of fashion is how easily they can be confused with slurs. Check Liszt’s Liebestraume, for example.
The following tuplet option would be useful in reproducing the older style:
These “marks”, which seem designed to distinguish tuplets from fingering, cannot be confused with legato slurs.
Composers of the past were well aware of the possible confusion between the tuplet round bracket and the legato slur and avoided it in many cases by writing the number only, or more often nothing at all since tuplets are generally obvious to a mature musician. I think that we would do well follow this economical practice of earlier composers.
Long rounded brackets ("slurs) were resorted to for clarification, as when rests were included, or within irregular groupings of tuplets in long runs. In most cases, the context clarifies whether these are also legato slurs or not… But not always, unfortunately; thus the introduction of the ugly square brackets.
I happen to like those a lot!
Is this what you’re looking for?
I created playing techniques using the SMuFL glyph tuplet3 (U+E883) and either the Unicode glyph Undertie (U+203F) or Character Tie (U+2040). Even though the Unicode glyphs are present in the Bravura font, I couldn’t access them in the Edit Playing Technique dialog, so I used the Windows font Times New Roman instead.
Sorry, “ugly” was an overstatement. I think that it depends on context. To me, square tuplet brackets looks great in 20th century music. But they look out of place in earlier music.
Very nice, @johnkprice While those slurs do the job, they are a little big (wide).
I didn’t quite understand why you couldn’t access the glyphs, however. I guess I will find out!.
In Finale, I’ve become adept at quickly drawing them in with the slur tool attached to beats rather than notes. It is more problematic in Dorico, so I will need to find a solution like yours.
I would say the little curved line style is … old-fashioned but not misleading, especially if it just hugs the number and doesn’t point to the notes. I don’t want to call it a “slur” since that’s exactly what it is not.
Actually, I meant that I liked the round ones as per your example, I remember seeing those in a lot of string quartet literature I used to play as a teenager, Mozart, Haydn and the like!
Yes, that’s exactly how I’d like tuplets to be depicted
Could you attach any pics about how to achieve that?
I tried looking for the indicated unicode chars but cannot find them (neither with the Bravura nor with the Times New Roman font).
As you are on Mac (obviously) select Show Emoji & Symbols from the Input Source menu bar item, select Unicode in the sidebar and scroll to U+20… which is in category General Punctuation. When the glyph is selected you see on the right side a preview of all fonts which include that glyph.
There is a bug in the dialogs that allow you to see glyphs in a range of Unicode values: if the From and To values are the same, then no glyph is shown even if that glyph is present in the chosen font. Simply make sure that the From value is less than the To value to see the desired glyphs.
Sorry I misunderstood, @YourMusic.Pro As you said, you will se those in a lot of music edited in the later 1800’s and first half of the 1900’s.
I created this Playing Technique tuplet indication by adding a Times Vertical parenthesis to the tuplet number: